Alameda supervisors delay discussion on just cause evictions
A small group of about 25 activists gathered in the plaza outside of the County of Alameda Administration Building on Tuesday morning with hand-drawn signs, boxes of sandwiches and plans to persuade the county's Board of Supervisors to pass just cause protections for tenants of single-family homes.
But just as the rally started, word came in that the supervisors had pushed their discussion on the topic until September. A smattering of boos came from the small crowd as Kristen Hackett, an organizer for My Eden Voice, the tenants' rights group behind the rally, announced the decision.
The board's decision to further delay discussion was a gut punch for the group, which organizers said has been pushing for legislation since 2019. And at the rally, the tone shifted as activists scrambled to remake their signs and rewrite their speeches. Hackett encouraged the crowd to bring their anger and their frustration when the rally resumed.
"It's frustrating, and it's really obvious that they don't care," said Les Morones, one of the speakers at the rally. "If they did care, they wouldn't be holding it up all of the time."
In 2019, California passed a statewide bill that prohibits landlords from evicting tenants on a whim, requiring them to provide "just cause" for the eviction. But renters of single-family and mobile homes weren't covered by the just cause bill, and the state left it up to local governments to extend these protections to those types of renters.
Some Bay Area municipalities have done just that. For example, Hayward passed a bill in 2019 that required just cause evictions for all renters. But renters living in unincorporated communities in the Bay Area don't have a local council to issue those protections. There, arbitrary evictions are rampant, activists said, especially in mobile home communities. So, housing activists from My Eden Voice turned to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
"A lot of renters in unincorporated areas fall through the cracks of the state policy," Hackett said.
The group thought that the board was poised to adopt just cause protections for single-family renters in March. But with the board deadlocked on the issue, Supervisor Nate Miley, who could have cast a tiebreaking vote, instead abstained, recommending that activists, supervisors and landlords enter a series of meetings to iron out the proposal.
Over the past three months, My Eden Voice had participated in multiple of these ad hoc meetings, Hackett said. Tuesday's regular meeting was where the board was supposed to present the findings of this process and determine a timeline to vote on the just cause proposal.
Hackett said that she was frustrated that the process was delayed again, but that the ad hoc meetings weren't very productive anyway. Morones echoed Hackett's frustration at the apparent lack of movement on just cause.
"We've been fighting, and we have gotten not one thing from them," Morones said.
But My Eden Voice is hoping to leverage state pressure to force the board to decide on just cause protections. California mandates that all of its local governments pass Housing Elements, eight-year plans explaining how they will meet housing needs for all residents.
Alameda County's last plan expired in 2022, and it hasn't implemented a new one since, even as the deadline to do so passed in January 2023. The California Department of Housing and Community Development rejected the county's recent draft of its Housing Element, suggesting, among numerous other things, that it work toward "increasing tenant protections," according to a July 9 letter.
My Eden Voice hopes to convince the Alameda County board that adding extended just cause protections will help its overdue Housing Element get approved by the state.
"It's time to get this passed," Clancy said. "We don't need to wait any longer."
The board will discuss the just cause protections at its Sept. 17 meeting. But there was a sense of uneasiness amongst some of the My Eden Voice activists who were unsure how the rest of the process would play out. In the meantime, the group's message would stay the same, but it might shout it a little louder and with a little more aggression, said My Eden Voice organizer Maria Miranda.
Many of the speakers at the Tuesday rally echoed this urgency, including Elena Torres. In comments translated from Spanish by Miranda, Torres described feeling trapped in seemingly endless cycle of evictions.
"If we keep waiting, if we keep delaying, how much longer until our children are up here fighting for the same thing?" asked Torres.